In our July meeting we were very pleased to have guest speaker Martin Patterson from St George’s Crypt, a facility for homeless people in Leeds.

Martin gave us an overview of the Crypt and how the building they use had been transformed from a working Crypt with bodies in to the facilities they have today including bedrooms, showers and hot meals.

We also learned about some of the current initiatives the Crypt is undertaking to expand it’s services to reach an ever wider audience as with the current day climate and tough times the Crypt is being used by more and more people from different backgrounds. We also crucially learned that becoming homeless is something that can happen to anyone in a swift change of circumstances.

The Roses also showed their generosity by donating lots of food for the crypt and the food bank they have set up with and we even got a fab thank you email from Martin:

"Thanks so much to all the lovely ladies at Buns'n'Roses for a really lively welcome, a fantastic response to the food drive and also the real support and interest you all showed in listening to my talk and for the support in buying vouchers and raffles tickets. It was a real pleasure to be with you."

It was a very engaging evening run by Martin and we’d like to thank him for his time and also wish the Crypt the best of luck with their up and coming fundraisers.

For this workshop we were joined by Harriet Walsh. Harriet has over 40 years of dressmaking experience and also happens to be the mother of our vice president! The aim for this workshop was to understand a little more about fabric and reading patterns. By the end of the workshop we were aiming to have cut out our pattern and fabric... at least that was the plan.

It was lovely to see the different fabric that everyone had chosen and consider how different one pattern can look with fabric choices.

We learnt a bit about fabric and how to identify warp and weft

After coming to terms with dressmaking sizes vs ready to wear (ready to wear sizing is generally much more generous!)

and then the cutting began

patterns have lots of information to look out for including dots, notches and lines!

Pattern cutting takes time and our roses were working industriously to complete their cutting in time

Last Book Club we read The Great Gatsby and the consensus was it was both a good and (mercifully) short read. Talking about it amongst the fine environs of the Tiled Hall Café we mulled over what it must be like to be so rich you can hire a hotel suite on a whim and then decide equally on a whim to leave it and what Prohibtion and the Depression must have been like to live through.

We talked about whether or not we trusted the narrator - not much but maybe more than the rest of the characters in the book and decided that Gatsby wasn’t the kind of man you’d want as a boyfriend. Daisy would be a fine short term friend that you’d see a lot of when she didn’t have a boyfriend but she wouldn’t be reliable in the long term. Not that she was reliable in the short term either – given the way she treatsGatsby. His love for her was more about the ideal of her and the reality of her rather let him down. Tom might have a lot of money and superficial charm but in reality he was thoroughly unpleasant and best avoided.

We split into camps when we divided the main characters into the following categories – marry, have a brief fling with, or shove off a cliff. Some of us would have had a fling with Gatsby. Some with Tom given this description of him '…the enormous power of that body, he seemed to fill those glistening boots until he strained the top lacing, and you could see a great pack of muscle shifting when his shoulder moved under his thin coat’. But as he is also arrogant, racist and rude we decided that actually the best bet was to take all of their considerable wealth off them and then throw them all off of a high cliff.

We also wrote names of books we fancied reading on slips of paper and then whichever one was drawn out of the bag would be the next read. Fried Green Tomatoes At The Whistle Stop Café by Fannie Flagg was the one pulled out and we will be discussing that on Sunday September 15th at 2pm. Venue to be confirmed.

It’d be great if you came along to discuss it too – don’t mind if you haven’t finished it. Only seen the film version, only read a Wikipedia entry about it, just come along and share your two-pennorth’s worth.